AKS

I use the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to host a few services, like Synapse, Remark42, and Plausible Analytics. As of yet, none of these services require much computing power, so I chose a small VM size for the AKS node: Standard_B2ms. I recently analyzed my Azure costs and found out that I could have saved more than a hundred bucks in the past months if I had been more diligent.

Did you ever think about running a Matrix homeserver? In this post, we will set one up on the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). We will use the reference homeserver implementation, which is Synapse from the folks at matrix.org. This post focuses on the Kubernetes stuff, keeping Synapse configuration to a minimum. Things like federation, delegation and PostgreSQL are out of scope, because plenty of excellent guides and the official documentation exist covering that. The icing on the cake will be the Synapse Admin UI deployment with secure access to the administration endpoints to make management of our homeserver easier.

Building upon our previous work, we will deploy Remark42 on Kubernetes with Terraform and integrate it with your existing Hugo website. Make sure to check out my previous posts about creating a Hugo Website and deploying an Azure Kubernetes Service cluster if you haven’t already.

In this post, we will deploy a simple Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster from scratch. To expose our web services securely, we will install Traefik 2 and configure cert-manager to manage Let’s Encrypt certificates. The best part about it: we will do everything with Terraform.